Do you like the school schedule we have? Do you believe our school has the best school schedule? What are some ways that we can improve our school schedule? These are the three questions I asked students here at Vestal High. For this month’s article I wanted to dive deeper into our school schedule and how it impacts our students’ health.
Have you ever heard of block scheduling? A school that has block scheduling has four classes per day, not including lunch. Typically, schools that have block scheduling will have lunch between classes. I experienced block scheduling in my old middle school and I have quite a few to say about it compared to scheduling that we have at our school. With only having four classes a day you have a lot of time in each of these classes, 90 minutes to be exact. You would have 90 minutes every single day for math and English. Doesn’t that sound like a delight. Okay, maybe not, but it was amazing in the sense of learning. You would have so much more time to comprehend/learn information by having classes especially for math and English. Now, classes like social studies and science would be one semester classes, and you would switch between the classes as the semester ends. This is where problems start to occur because students that are taking AP/IB classes here in our high school would have to relearn the information to prepare for their IB/AP exams if they had taken their IB/AP classes in the first semester.
There’s a lot of problems that occur when we’re discussing what is the best school schedule as everybody has different needs/wants and every school district is different. Depending on what classes they offer and what you want to do in the future, you would have different preferences on how you would like your school schedule to set out to be. Here’s the things that students definitely want in their school schedule. Later start for classes. I think we can all agree that 8:00 in the morning every single day for 5 days out of the week is way too early. One student argued that 10:30 is right around the time that our teenage brains are fully awake. Based on the research that I have done, 8:00 is way too early for our teenage brains to wake up. Most students, like me, have to wake up around 5:00 to 5:30 in the morning to catch their buses to get to school in time. So, based on this information, 8:00 is way too early, and we need a later start time.
Let’s talk about classes and how long they should be. As you enter high school, you slowly start to have ideas on what you would like to do in the future. Luckily for us, our school offers lots of options for us based on what we want to major/ have our career in. However, there are nine classes every single day that are around 45 minutes long each. Is that enough for core classes? Many students argue that 45 minutes for their math class is not enough. Yes, our school offers labs for Algebra 1 but that’s only for Algebra 1. What about other math classes? A lot of students that are taking higher level classes like AP/IB argue that 45 minute classes are not enough to inhale all the information they need to get a 7 on their IB exams and a 5 on their AP exam, especially because New York does not start school until September. Many schools start in August, so a lot of students are ahead of them already. Do you think that this fair is for students that started the class in September and have only 45 minutes every single day for that class leading up to the exam compared to students who have been taking AP World History since August for 90 minutes every day? I would assume that you said no because it’s not fair. Now that we understand that we need so much more time for these higher level and core classes, what about electives and PE class? Those classes do not need to be 90 minutes long every single day. So what about that? What do we do with these classes that students want to take but they don’t need to be as long as those higher level and core classes? How do we fit that into our school schedule? I would say around 35 minutes to 45 minutes is enough for electives and PE class, and we don’t need to be taking PE every single day. Every other day we would have PE for 45 minutes but then would we have enough time for our electives? Electives should be around 45 minutes but how do we fit that into our schedule? What if we make electives one semester long or every other day?
What about free periods and lunch? If you ask any student ever they would argue that, yes, we 100% need those classes every single day. I’m not going to deny that because we do need lunch. How long should lunch be? I would say around 45 minutes to an hour is the perfect time for lunch. As for free periods, 45 minutes is also perfect.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to build the dream school schedule as school districts cannot, for most part, put together all the students’ wants and needs into one perfect schedule. Managing and maintaining a great school structure is hard when different classes require different amounts of time. That’s why many schools and many districts have the same amount of time for each class like ours. You can look at any school district and how they manage their school schedule and find problems with it. However, there is one thing that we can change and that’s the time that we wake up for school. No matter who I talk to, every single student argues that 8:00 as the school starting time is way too early.
Overall, We can see that it’s hard to make the change for better school timing. However, taking small steps like changing the school starting time is a major step. Will we ever be perfect? No! Will there still be students that find problems? Yes! Does school take up too much time? Yes! Do we get a lot of stress and anxiety from school? Yes! What do you think is that we can take to make school better?
